Lost on the Tour du Mont Blanc

We found something even better.

We were so captivated by the view, we forgot to look at our map.

Let me be clear. The Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB), a 110-mile hiking trail circumnavigating the craggy peaks of the French, Italian, and Swiss Alps, is well-marked. Signs even indicate how long it will take to hike to the top of a mountain pass or the next village. 

Yet, we took a left when we should have turned right. Hopelessly lost, my hiking buddy and I were miles from where our hiking app wanted us to be. But as so often happens in life – the path we took led us to where we were meant to be.

Sonja, whose tousled red hair and silvery laugh hint at a person ready for an evening of fun instead spent the night before our ten-day trek throwing up in our hotel room. While I filled our hydration packs and laced my boots, she lay on her bed, massaging a splitting headache and roiling stomach.

“It’s just altitude sickness. If I just take a few sips of coffee, I’ll feel better,” she told me at breakfast. I looked at her doubtfully. We had a steep 10-mile hike ahead of us. A tough day even for someone who hadn’t gone without breakfast and sleep. She couldn’t keep water down. Coffee was out of the question. And she certainly couldn’t eat the buttery croissants laid out on the table in a French version of carbo-loading.

It was an ominous start to the epic trek we’d been planning for nearly a year.

Would you have called off the hike? Spent the day nursing your friend? You are more charitable than me. I willed the woman whose croissant I was eating to miraculously morph into the energetic redhead I’d trekked through Nepal with nearly 40 years ago. At the moment, she could barely lift her head from the table. 

Sonja is no stranger to hiking. She’s been to Kilimanjaro. She lives in Oslo where the trails are steps from her mountain cabin. And so from somewhere, she pulled out enough grit to ride the cable car up the mountain to the start of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

A year’s worth of planning had brought us to the Alps. Leaning on our hiking sticks, we stared across an emerald green valley to the snow-covered mountain baking under a baby blue sky. I was Heidi in the Swiss Alps. I was Maria singing and skipping through mountain meadows in the Sound of Music. Perhaps we should have spent more time staring at a map rather than the view because I was also lost. 

Not that we were entirely at fault. We met several hikers on the trail and asked all of them if we were headed in the direction of the small village where we would spend the night. Although none of them spoke English, they all nodded agreeably. Because what do you do when you want to be friendly, but don’t understand? You point and smile. Unfortunately, they pointed left when we should have turned right.

So, we threaded our way down a forest path instead of up toward the glacier. As the forest became thicker and the path thinner, we knew definitively that we were lost. Every once in awhile Sonja would sit down on a log and gamely take a few sips of water. She ate half a banana and immediately felt worse. I coaxed her down the trail with the promise of a cup of coffee like a parent doling out candy to a small child. We’d abandoned the idea of hiking the TMB. We simply wanted to find the nearest village. 

A clue that we were not on the right trail.

Eventually, we came across some railroad tracks, and like lost hunters following a creek hoping that it would lead to civilization, we walked alongside them until the hillside became so steep that there was nowhere to walk except on the tracks themselves. A small train lumbering its way up the hill convinced us to gingerly side-step down the mountain meadow to a dirt path a hundred yards below. “It’s got to go somewhere,” I told Sonja. 

And it did – dumping us onto a road in the middle of nowhere. Should we turn right? Left? How long would it take us to walk to the nearest village? We had no idea.

We needed a guardian angel or perhaps Hermes, the Greek protector of travelers, to swoop down and lead us to a cup of coffee to silence Sonja’s screaming headache and a bed to lay her head on. He arrived in a small black car with a precocious four-year-old in the back seat. 

When I stopped the car to ask for directions to the nearest town, the driver told us to hop in. “It’s too far for you to walk,” he said in English. He’d drop us off at a cafe where we could get a cup of coffee and show us the bus stop. “Don’t take a taxi,” he said, “the bus is much cheaper.”  

“We can’t tell you how grateful we are,” I said as our French protector drove the windy country road and his four-year-old son chattered happily in French next to me. 

“No problem,” he responded and explained that he’d been helped by strangers when he’d encountered difficulties while traveling in Cambodia. That’s where he’d met his wife and where he’d learned to become a professional cook. Ten minutes of life stories later, the man and his son dropped us off in front of a small cafe and pointed out the bus stop that would take us to the town where our hotel was located. 

Sonja did feel slightly better after drinking the shot of espresso, but not well enough to sit in the sun for two hours until the next bus came. This time it was Sonja who approached a rotund man and his wiry partner. They were stuffing bags of groceries into the back seat of a small compact hardly big enough for two grown men and a week’s worth of provisions let alone two women and their backpacks. 

An age ago, Sonja and I were desperate to leave Pakistan after several months of living under the country’s rigid laws. Our flight was overbooked, and it looked as if we might be bumped. As tears streamed down our faces, the ticket agent took pity on us and made room on the flight. The look of desperation crossing our faces as we heard that they were traveling in the opposite direction was no less effective.

“We’ll give you a ride,” said the older gentleman as he opened the driver’s door. 

“We couldn’t possibly,” I responded, wondering how we would fit even as Sonja was making toward the back seat. His mop-headed partner, who’d already started moving the front passenger seat forward to make room for us, clasped his hands in front of his impossible girth and said gallantly, “It would be our pleasure.” 

How could we refuse such an invitation? Sonja and I piled into the backseat. Our palpable relief crowded out the groceries, hiking sticks, and day packs. Soon we arrived in the village where we’d spend the night, but not before we’d found common ground and the kind of connection that comes through serendipitous meetings: our charming chauffeurs had lived in Sweden for a time. We shared a love of Swedish social programs, food, and the ancient university town of Uppsala.

Thanks to some helpful locals we finally made it to our hotel.

How often is it that we bemoan our wrong turns in life and only later realize that we are exactly where we are meant to be? 

I can’t say I wasn’t frustrated that we’d come so far only to screw things up on the very first day. Our guidebook talked about the suspension bridge that we’d never cross. And extolled the glacier that we missed. I’d had visions of seeing alpine meadows blanketed in wildflowers instead of threading my way uncertainly through a pine forest. 

But getting lost on the Tour du Mont Blanc was the best thing that could have happened to us. If not for a few wrong turns, we would have ended up hiking ten miles, which would have been impossible in Sonja’s condition. Instead, we found ourselves exactly where we needed to be – in the warm hospitality and care of a few local Frenchmen. People who after the briefest of conversations became as indelibly etched into our memories of Mt. Blanc as the craggy, ash-colored peaks themselves.

Sonja recovered. Epic trek.